Time travel narratives are in some regard a paradigm for speculative fiction itself. They focalize the broader tradition of setting a story at a distant historical moment, future or past, passing that experience of change through the character of the time traveler who must confront both the radical difference and the certain knowledge that this world, however different, nonetheless evolved out of, or will evolve into, the world our time traveller knows — asking them, and us, to reflect on the known world with the certainty that it contains within it the real possibility of radical difference, as well as the reality of structural forces that constrain historical change. In short, the time travel narrative is more or less a purification of Darko Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” hypothesis about speculative fiction, and always has been.
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